Transnational Crime Fiction by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030534134
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Changing Views on Marriage and the Mobile Female

It is no coincidence that each of the female characters mentioned begins single and eventually marries within her respective story/series, as marriage was not only customary in Victorian literature, but a requirement for the Victorian female who had no sufficient means of supporting herself. Yet, Hester, Hero and Kat are not held to the same restrictiveness as Esther, Lady Dedlock or Irene, as the former are both able to move more fluidly between social classes at greater intervals and given the latitude to do so by the men in their lives. Their husbands simultaneously appreciate and depend upon their uncharacteristic (and socially inappropriate) behaviours, and this may be due to the changing perceptions of the institution of marriage itself.

As previously mentioned, Victorian women were expected to keep the home in perfect running order. Georgene Corry Benham declares in her etiquette manual that home “is the kingdom of Woman. It is her duty to embellish and make it tasteful and cozy” (1). To that end, all things unpleasant were seen to exist outside of the home, as Ruskin asserts: home “is a place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division…. so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home” (51). In this sense, Esther’s efficiency at Bleak House plays foil to the dysfunction of poor households as seen through characters like the brickmakers’ wives and Mrs. Jellyby. Ruskin’s avowal that the “anxieties of the outer life” should not be allowed to penetrate the home also provides an explanation for the Dedlocks’ demise; Lady Dedlock’s marriage is a failure because she has not lived up to the societal ideals. She has allowed the chaos of her previous life to disturb the domesticity of her home, and the only social mobility between classes that we see from her is linked to this downfall—she wears the cloak of a poor woman, roams the squalid streets of London in the cold and dies at Captain Hawdon/Nemo’s grave. In contrast, Esther’s marriage to Woodcourt is ideal in its nature: she has demonstrated her abilities to keep an orderly house throughout the novel, has adhered to and thrived within her restrictions, and readers are left to believe that the pair live happily ever after, and thus no mystery is to be had beyond that union so that is where the story ends.

Victorian feminist writers took issue with such portrayals, as they fail to address the foibles of deeply entrenched marriage ideals. In The Morality of Marriage (1897), Scottish author and feminist Mona Caird states thatwe have subjected women for centuries to a life, which called forth one or two forms of domestic activity; we have rigorously excluded (even punished) every other development of power; and we have then insisted that

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